It's like Netflix for History: the world's finest documentary streaming service -- use the code 'Odyssey' to get 50% off your History Hit subscription! bit.ly/3AQ8pPJ
Great videos but seriously, why would anyone pay for this stuff given ... you know ... that thing called the internet (hence the odd '50%' discount I guess)? And 'like Netflix for History' doesn't make any sense. The world is saturated enough as it is with Netflix and many free history channels too. The videos look OK, but doubt a $12/mth subscription to a history channel is going to get much traction given what's out there for free - their content would have to be really high-quality and groundbreaking history available no-where else for that to happen. Anyway, that's IMHO, nice video, but not 'pay-for-it-coz-you-can't-find-it-anywhere-else' standard LOL.
I think the best part is that the only reason we have it is because the barge was intentionally sunk to make an improvised levee. The Roman engineers knew that there in the bend of the river, it would fill up with silt and reinforce the bank for a long time. And sure enough, not only did it do the job they wanted, their plan preserved it for 2000 years. Remarkable.
It is so exciting to find ancient boats. Much more, I believe, than locating the foundations of ancient buildings. With the boats, you can really see the work that when into making them. Plus, there are only a small handful of preserved ancient boats in the entire world. I can't get enough of these.
I agree. You can see the timbers that were shaped by a human hand thousands of years ago. Seeing something like wood that normally rots as quick as we do when dead survive thousands of years gives us a tangible connection to our ancestors. So amazing..
If you love old boats and you live in the UK or if you ever visit, you should check out the Dover museum and the Bronze age boat, it's awesome. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Bronze_Age_Boat
Amazing find. But what blew my mind the most, is the extraordinary preservation of those fish traps. You can easily imagine bored Roman legionnaires weaving them in free time, hoping to catch some fresh fish to add to their military rations.
In 1981 several roman boats were found in Mainz, Germany inside the former roman harbour. Two universities, a large group of students, some archaelogists and historians used the dimensions of the wrecks to rebuild such a boat called Lusoria Rhenana. In 2011 with a well trained crew the ship reached a maximum speed of 7 knots and showed an astonishing manoeuvrability.
Spectacular episode. It sucks that the local government can't protect this in some way like as a scheduled monument (England) or a historic site (America) or how other countries do such things. Especially since all the archaeologists were totally stoked about it being so unique. I really enjoyed this episode!
I think British governments are just as bad now as commerce rules. America preserves what's above ground as their history is less than 300 years. They also destroy the history of the natives and continue to steal their land for oil exploration.
See 42.00. It's protected. They keep part of the boat in the ground in the environment that kept the boat preserved for 2 millenium already and without big changes will keep on doing it for millenia to come. The Netherlands has pretty decent laws for preserving archeologist finds and organisation of it's archeology. Many archeologist are working for local government. The the reasoning for keeping it in the ground if it not be disturbed is that in the future there will be better techniques to explore them, and the preservation cost is lower this way. Getting a building permit is not easy in the Netherlands. If someone want to built at that site something that will disturb the soil at the depth of the remains of the boat and thus threatened it, they will have to pay for excavation. For example in the small city of Woerden 20 km downstreams ,a boat and castellum (fort) was found at the spot were an underground parking garage was planned. That boat was completely dug up and sight completely explored,. The parking garage is now named Castellum and has a small display about the dig and shows some the finds.
@@julesforsyth2996 And destroy statues and rocks and buildings that might be racist! Also get the Confederate flag completely wrong and want that removed. People are just going stupid over here.
@@julesforsyth2996 Our town, in the state of New Hampshire, has two indigenous sites that are very old and have been well documented. One is a stone fish trap in a small river that dates to 4,100 years ago and the other is a seasonal campsite that has been dated to 11,400 years ago.
Drawings and Graphics for this video are VERY helpful in clarifying the subjects discussed so Enthusiastically by the Archaeologists. Friends have told me that Nederlands Beer is EXCELLENT. I hope everyone satisfied their thirst.
As a river boat captain, this makes me wonder if my vessel will ever be part of an archaeological dig. At the same time, if I am doing my job correctly my vessel should end up in a steel scrap yard and not a river bottom. It’s almost sad to think that without some kind of apocalyptic event, the record of history nowadays should be clear enough that excavation will no longer be necessary post industrial revolution.
I'm not at all sure the history of our current time will be clear in the future. If you look back even to 120 years ago, details of how some early acoustic gramophones were made has now been lost. And digital information is even harder to store permanently than paper, wood or stone. Even if we don't suffer some disaster, I very much doubt even in a few 100 years whether people would know everything they would like to about our current time. I mean - think even of how so much television has been lost, and when it survives often it is in a very degraded quality (I'm thinking TV news footage from the 1970s, say).
@@patrickpaganini And then there's that thing where available hundred to several hundred year old historical documentation of various things from recipes to railroad car maintenance says that such-and-such was "done in the usual way" and the way was so widespread and usual that nobody bothered to specifically document it!
Amazing detective work. So many nuances. I really liked how they tried to tie the boat to commerce between the Rhine and England. And that it used a Mediterranean construction technique. Since the later boat was built differently, smaller without tennons, I wonder if the Romans decided the bigger design did not fit with Rhine commerce. Or maybe at this time the upper Rhine was not as firmly under Roman control as the lower Rhine so the boats did not travel so far upstream. Also, how were they towed - by cattle along the adjacent Roman road? It seems towing would limit the boats to the lower Rhine for delivering goods upstream. Maybe they used smaller simply made boats or rafts to bring goods from farther upstream. I thought about being an archeologist but studied engineering instead. All that digging in mud and dirt would have been trying. But how special to be involved in discovering the forgotten past. As far as the video, interesting to hear the Dutch with English at least as good as the English.
Rivers have shifted constantly over time. I was recently watching videos about the river boat Sultana tragedy north of Memphis, the ruins of which are no longer in the river, but under the soil of some Arkansas farmers field.
I'm guessing the metal spear head belonged to the "retired soldier" who became a shipper and took it with him as a memento from his soldering days. Imagine if it was from the actual spear he used in battles! To him, it would be a sacred souvinir; a tangible piece of his legacy; an object for his children and aquaintances to touch and marvel at as he tells war stories about how he used it in battles.
The computer model of the boat at the end showed what I suspected they would do, which is to show perfectly straight, smooth, regularly spaced bottom frames, for example. BUT! The original boat showed very irregular sizes, spacing, and smoothness to the frames. In fact, most were very irregularly sawn out and the whole was quite rustic. The planks were probably less so but still not at all like the computer model of the boat suggests. The differences add up to night versus day.
It's is amazing how different people with different backgrounds come together to make a discovery that shows the human beings of long ago. I wish I could of had this when I was young.
It really sucks how archeologists and historians can't take over an entire site for as long as they need with no time limits. There's like liquid gold underneath our feet that will probably never be discovered for the next thousand years or if even it lasts that long..... It just makes me sad.....
It is not true that their is no natural stone in the Netherlands. In the East and South their is, but that is mostly limestone and that is not suited and used for reenforcing riverbanks then and now. You have to import for that purpose heavy hard stone like basalt or granite or as they do now produce it from concrete. Otherwise you can repeat the operation every ten years or so because it is soluble and very soft. Good for building houses and churches but not for building dijkes. (I have to mispell it, because otherwise the text is deleted by You Tube)
In one of the earliest Time Team episodes they mention that no one has ever found a Roman boat. Since then dozens have been found all over Europe, in varying conditions, although I believe we're still missing some of the bigger ocean going vessels. It's unlikely we'll ever find those. After all the only reason we have Viking ships is because they were buried with their owners, and that was a few hundred years later
For anyone interested or studying this (and forgive me if this is already common knowledge but I just thought I'd throw it in)... there is a very similar (although much smaller) boat like this in a museum in Dover (UK). From memory, I believe the Dover one is attributed to the Stone Age but the construction looks very similar. In this video (around 37:00-38:00) there is discussion of these barges being used to transfer cargo to sea-going boats, then up the Thames estuary. Is it possible that the Dover boat is actually Roman? (There is a Roman house in Dover as well) Is it possible that there were smaller versions of this boat is use in the UK to transport cargo offloaded from the sea-going vessels? Just a thought.
The Dover boat dates from the early bronze age and is around 3,500 years old dating from 1575-1520 BC. The late neolithic ended around 1900 BC, the Bronze age started around 1200 BC. note that the beginnings and ends of these eras did not occur everywhere at the same time. A half size replica of this boat was constructed, initial leakage problems solved and in 2014 successfully sailed from Folkestone to Dover. I'm not an expert, just googled to find accurate information. -dave (Undergraduate degree in Anthropology/Archaeology)
@@seanfaherty Carbon dating of wood can be inaccurate if the wood was saturated with fresh water for any length of time. For wood structures, like these boats, Dendrochronology is fairly accurate in the UK to about 4200 BC. -dave
I think they're leaving this on in the ground because there's already some other boats they excavated. It's amazing the kind of stuff they find here. In my town (Nijmegen, also a Roman town and allegedly the oldest still inhabited city) they found a Roman mummy in a sarcophagus. That is in the museum here now, along with a war chariot and a lot of other stuff. Every time there's a dig in certain areas of the city they ALWAYS find stuff.
I live near Exeter (a major Roman site) in South Western England. Parts of the original Roman city walls still exist and the original river bridge was preserved. I’d love to know if any Roman boats were found.
What I find fascinating about the tools is just how much they look like tools that would have been around in the 1800´s to early 1900´s. I got some sheers and tools that look pretty much exactly the same. My father even has planes that look just like those roman ones.
The shears are identical to what can be bought today. They sheared sheep taking off the wool with a scissor like action. Those wood planes are used by some carpenters. Why I don't know but they work as good as a pot metal plane. Mind you the carpenters had multiple planes.
@@bunzeebear2973 Wooden planes are used because of a few different reasons. Ease of adjustment, while one would think that the mechanism on metal planes is better it is actually more elaborate and can be more finnicy. While learning curve on wooden planes is steeper, once you got it you can set them with a hammer in seconds. Also the way they glide. Metal planes have a higher friction needing more force and at times lubrication, while wood on wood glides much easier. Together with the lightness of wooden planes they also make working for longer times much easier. The feedback you get from working is also supposedly better in wodden planes.
This video is almost 10 years old. You can now have a look at ‘De Meern 1’ in the Museum Hoge Woerd in Utrecht. In the museum in the archeological theme park Archeon in Alphen aan de Rijn you can see ‘De Zwammerdam 2’.
Given that ship builders and woodworkers deliberately avoid using sapwood due to the inherent stability problems with it, finding it would be surprising to find much of it in the boat. So sad just to cover it up again after all that work.
At 35.35 Mick dismisses the wood pole as nothing to do with the boat because it is on top of the rocks. However if the pole was stowed at the side of the boat and the boat was on the cant then the rocks could easily have rolled under the pole. In other words, could the pole be part of the vessel and in fact be the derigged cross spar of the top of the square sail
@@jamesnewbold2134 no need for ballast in a river boat. ballast only makes sense if you put it into the lowest part of a v-shaped boat, this boat is flat. then the ballast is used to counter the forces of the wind that tilt the boat sideways when the wind does not come from straight behind. this boat is only able to sail when the wind does come from straight behind. However: if the rock was brought there from somewhere upriver it would have been brought there by boat... IF it was cargo the pole that was on top of it could have been part of the boat.
It is amazing how much actual work YOU don't SEE. A little bit of hand shovel work, wooden spatula work, drinking beer work. The housing complex could build around the dig site making it the last area to build on. Meaning they have time to dig it up...if they really wanted it. More people with more spatulas and plastic snow shovels. I don't know, maybe get lucky and find a slave still tethered to an oar? You do it while the sun shines, for a rainy day is just miserable. They dug out the inside. To dig out the outside of the boat(free it from the mud/clay takes much more work to remove much more material.)
The story of Caligula is myth deviced by his enemies in the Senate after his death and damnatio memoriae and made a monster of him . They have done the same with other emperors like Tiberius, Domitianus and Commodus etc., after mostly murdering them, who mostly were fyscaly prudent and wouldn't let them profit corruptly. It is likely that the soldiers just refused to embark , because Roman soldiers were unbelievable supersticious and afraid for the ocean. Of course a General with authority, like Vespasianus a view years later would have succeeded to convince them to go, but in that stage of his carreer he wasn't yet able to do it.
Caligula and his sister likely they imprisoned them house arrest style alone together as young teens who did not know if today we die or not for years. The huge ships build in a lake for a very expensive show found. The rest we don't know. Caligula not in power long enough to build the favor of the common man like Nero who slandered by the upper classes had two different movements after his death named for him a sign of strong support from the people.
I was there with my colleagues from the Geological Survey of the Netherlands. I was keen to collect molluscs for an environmental reconstruction of the deposits. Unfortunately no molluscs were present.
@36:16 - I say this wider longer barge got stuck in a tight bend. It could have gotten high-centered on a sand or silt bar, so they just used it in a utilitarian way. Just like the far too huge cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal.
I’m sorry but I still can’t agree with taking a chain saw to that beautifully preserved piece of history and a huge section at that, I’m very familiar with dendrology in the dating of early historic homes and Never is more than a few bored samples or-cores needed from 6 to 12 inches in depth. But honestly I’m no Roman archeologist to be truthful.
I have a question concerning the whole "3" day issue. When a discovery of this importance is found, dig the whole thing out, If doing that takes "3" weeks, then so be it. ... [We can only dig two trenches] .. Again, if you need to, after discovering anything, and then to presurve the history of what it is you found, takes 3 weeks, then that is how long you stay.
In this case it was perfict they did not have enough time to get the boat out period just enough to verify it's status before construction occured. The site marked for a future dig assuming someone comes up with the funds and way to preserve it better than just leaving it in the ground. Think of Time Team as a site finder with most serious work done later assuming they find something worth doing.
time team was a TV sponsored mega test pit and emergency rescue resource , anything left in the ground can be dug better next year,next decade next century this is why the site mangers only allows limited dig area on a site and some times limited trench numbers. there is now a drive to have a you tube supported version.
@@RedRocket4000 Given that the only thing that would have been delayed by fully excavating this ship was a proposed bike path, there's no reason why it couldn't have been done.
@@nobodyspecial4702 the problem is not the digging, it´s the storage. If you haven´t the perfect storage facilities, money for preservation or both, it´s better to let it in the ground for future generations who - hopefully - will have the necessary funding. Plus, science is evolving, maybe future scientifical methods would be better for research, storage, etc. Till then, the ground will preserve it better, like it did the last 2000 years.
I don't know why they call it a "barge" a barge is generally not self powered, it's a floating dock that gets pulled/push around. This was a sail boat.
My grandfather, a lifelong expert in woodworking, wood species, and their growth (though not a scientist) was always skeptical of "dendro dating" (dendrochronology) for the primary reason that trees do not uniformly experience weather or seasons between other trees. The basic premise of the scientific process is measuring the tree rings which grow thicker in wetter seasons, thinner in drier seasons, and can show other events like fire. The idea being if you can align the fluctuations of tree rings with other dated tree samples you can estimate when it lived and died (provided you have a full set of rings). The issue my grandfather had with this process is you can have a single grove of trees where some trees produce entirely different rings throughout their life because of minor differences in landscape. The trees on top of a hill might get far more wind and far less water. The trees in a gulch might have more water and less wind, but also less sunlight. The variations in a single grove can be great, so it becomes an absurdity to think you can match the partial ring sample from a boat beam to an incredibly incomplete database of rings patterns when you can't even say what country that tree was cut down. Simply put, it's a science with no reasonable frame of reference. It's almost like randomly picking 10 gene markers and then declaring whether or not it's first cousins with a different random 10 gene markers from another sample. You haven't nearly the data to even begin making that determination.
Luckily weather has always changed and therefore major things like a volcanic eruption show up on trees in a large area, and these major events are the biggest contributor to finding the same timeframe, the specifics will always be different for any tree, agreed.
There are other boats on display. The most important thing about this 1 is the knowledge that was gained by ascertaining its size, construction, method of loss and accurate dating. The boat has been completely preserved by being buried in the waterlogged soil for 2 millennia - best to leave it there until better technological or archaeological considerations (or climate changes) decide otherwise.
@@theoztreecrasher2647 But there's also a possibility that the location of the boat could be forgotten or lost again to history if it's left buried. But practically speaking, it all comes down to money, it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if not, millions to preserve and display it.
@@supertouring1 There is, of course, the possibility that the recorded and published GPS co-ordinates might disappear from University Libraries and the disseminated servers of the World Wide Web (especially if things continue to deteriorate in Eastern Europe and the Far East.) However, if the unthinkable happens and much of humanity is obliterated with most of its accrued knowledge, it is still probably best to have this left underground for study when the next iteration of human civilization claws its way up out of the radioactive slime. No? 🤔😁
Technology and technique has come so far since then. Imagine building something of that scale and having to use 40,000 massive nails. That would literally weigh several thousand kilograms in just nails..like 4-8000kgs. Imagine the order - "building a boat, need 35-40,000 hand made nails"..
The thing is, Roman civilisation was pretty "industrialised" for its time. Not like us, but they had standarts and streamlined processes. A kind of proto mass production. A very good example are the mountains of broken amphores we find that were basically single use items. A nail in roman times was very likely much more affordable than later in the medieval times.
24:43 Wait...they've got a key that was reworked into a chisel, indicating these people made tools out of any metal they could lay their hands on. But using a spear point as a tool is somehow a ridiculous idea, even though I can see it was struck on the back without even holding it in my hands!! 🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂
If the contents of my shed were on that boat, there would be an axe head without a handle, that's been used to split logs as a wedge, a pickaxe without a handle too. Just saying sometimes we keep stuff with the intention of fixing, or because they're handy in other ways. That spear like you say, was very likely the same, kept with the intention of fixing, or being used in other ways.
Wait, they dated it to the time of Caligula partially because of the coins they found? What if the soldiers just had coins from a few years back with them? When I was in the army I had coins with Washington on them.
There's a lot of statistics and methodology behind it. In short: coins with the current emperor were most likely to be carried, because coins were minted as propaganda for the reigning monarch. Statistically, the most up to date coins were carried by the military (especially as they were freshly supplied from the mints for their salary). If a significant portion of coins are from Caligula and none are later, there's a more than fair chance that that is the rough date of the site.
@Merovech correct, but where were the coins being minted? Did the soldiers use their coins right away or is it possible they are older and they were held by the soldiers until they would get them stamped if they had the old emporers coins on them? This seems like it'd be a remote base. Seems like if this is what it is based off of it is shaky at best.
They dated it according to the AGE OF THE WOOD(chainsaw cut) So, they know when the tree existed. Then using MATH they could figure out which ruler was ruling at that time.
TT only go were invited so I expect you will find the dutch guys needed cash to continue their dig so you can thank the British for paying for it's discovery.
It's like Netflix for History: the world's finest documentary streaming service -- use the code 'Odyssey' to get 50% off your History Hit subscription! bit.ly/3AQ8pPJ
Great videos but seriously, why would anyone pay for this stuff given ... you know ... that thing called the internet (hence the odd '50%' discount I guess)? And 'like Netflix for History' doesn't make any sense. The world is saturated enough as it is with Netflix and many free history channels too. The videos look OK, but doubt a $12/mth subscription to a history channel is going to get much traction given what's out there for free - their content would have to be really high-quality and groundbreaking history available no-where else for that to happen. Anyway, that's IMHO, nice video, but not 'pay-for-it-coz-you-can't-find-it-anywhere-else' standard LOL.
I think the best part is that the only reason we have it is because the barge was intentionally sunk to make an improvised levee. The Roman engineers knew that there in the bend of the river, it would fill up with silt and reinforce the bank for a long time. And sure enough, not only did it do the job they wanted, their plan preserved it for 2000 years. Remarkable.
As someone who's studying archeology, and writing his thesis on Roman ships, this documentary came like a miracle of God for me:D
Bore off
As someone who, through scuba diving, took underwater archaeology courses, I too found it fascinating
What a great name you have!!
God is good 👍
@@alanaadams7440 Which god?
I am so addicted to the Time Team. I watch everything I can find from them. So interesting and entertaining!
It is so exciting to find ancient boats. Much more, I believe, than locating the foundations of ancient buildings. With the boats, you can really see the work that when into making them. Plus, there are only a small handful of preserved ancient boats in the entire world. I can't get enough of these.
I agree. You can see the timbers that were shaped by a human hand thousands of years ago. Seeing something like wood that normally rots as quick as we do when dead survive thousands of years gives us a tangible connection to our ancestors. So amazing..
If you love old boats and you live in the UK or if you ever visit, you should check out the Dover museum and the Bronze age boat, it's awesome. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Bronze_Age_Boat
Amazing find. But what blew my mind the most, is the extraordinary preservation of those fish traps. You can easily imagine bored Roman legionnaires weaving them in free time, hoping to catch some fresh fish to add to their military rations.
I love how passionate the guy, with what he's doing, who used spatula to reduce damage of the boat.
Then a chainsaw to get it dated. Crazy.
In 1981 several roman boats were found in Mainz, Germany inside the former roman harbour. Two universities, a large group of students, some archaelogists and historians used the dimensions of the wrecks to rebuild such a boat called Lusoria Rhenana. In 2011 with a well trained crew the ship reached a maximum speed of 7 knots and showed an astonishing manoeuvrability.
Spectacular episode. It sucks that the local government can't protect this in some way like as a scheduled monument (England) or a historic site (America) or how other countries do such things. Especially since all the archaeologists were totally stoked about it being so unique. I really enjoyed this episode!
I think British governments are just as bad now as commerce rules. America preserves what's above ground as their history is less than 300 years.
They also destroy the history of the natives and continue to steal their land for oil exploration.
A lot of these ships have been found already in the same region
See 42.00. It's protected. They keep part of the boat in the ground in the environment that kept the boat preserved for 2 millenium already and without big changes will keep on doing it for millenia to come. The Netherlands has pretty decent laws for preserving archeologist finds and organisation of it's archeology. Many archeologist are working for local government. The the reasoning for keeping it in the ground if it not be disturbed is that in the future there will be better techniques to explore them, and the preservation cost is lower this way. Getting a building permit is not easy in the Netherlands. If someone want to built at that site something that will disturb the soil at the depth of the remains of the boat and thus threatened it, they will have to pay for excavation. For example in the small city of Woerden 20 km downstreams ,a boat and castellum (fort) was found at the spot were an underground parking garage was planned. That boat was completely dug up and sight completely explored,. The parking garage is now named Castellum and has a small display about the dig and shows some the finds.
@@julesforsyth2996 And destroy statues and rocks and buildings that might be racist! Also get the Confederate flag completely wrong and want that removed. People are just going stupid over here.
@@julesforsyth2996 Our town, in the state of New Hampshire, has two indigenous sites that are very old and have been well documented. One is a stone fish trap in a small river that dates to 4,100 years ago and the other is a seasonal campsite that has been dated to 11,400 years ago.
Great news! I live relatively close to Utrecht, I love to travel to places related to the Imperium Romanum and film them, I want more such videos!!! 😍
This isn't news though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This episode is from 2006.
I agree totally!
@@MuscarV2 New enough given its origin date!
If you haven't yet, you should visit the Castellum in Hoge Woerd, might be exactly your type of thing!
One of my favorite Time team episodes. This was fascinating.
Fascinating. Why the heck was this program never aired in the USA? AGH! Glad I found it now.
I remember watching TT episodes on RUclips some yrs ago, so it was available but not very accessibly.
More a British Program.
This does show on some cable TV in the U.S.
Bravo! Time Team never ceases to amaze, entertain, and enlighten!
Drawings and Graphics for this video are VERY helpful in clarifying the subjects discussed so Enthusiastically by the Archaeologists. Friends have told me that Nederlands Beer is EXCELLENT. I hope everyone satisfied their thirst.
As a river boat captain, this makes me wonder if my vessel will ever be part of an archaeological dig. At the same time, if I am doing my job correctly my vessel should end up in a steel scrap yard and not a river bottom. It’s almost sad to think that without some kind of apocalyptic event, the record of history nowadays should be clear enough that excavation will no longer be necessary post industrial revolution.
I'm not at all sure the history of our current time will be clear in the future. If you look back even to 120 years ago, details of how some early acoustic gramophones were made has now been lost. And digital information is even harder to store permanently than paper, wood or stone. Even if we don't suffer some disaster, I very much doubt even in a few 100 years whether people would know everything they would like to about our current time. I mean - think even of how so much television has been lost, and when it survives often it is in a very degraded quality (I'm thinking TV news footage from the 1970s, say).
@@patrickpaganini And then there's that thing where available hundred to several hundred year old historical documentation of various things from recipes to railroad car maintenance says that such-and-such was "done in the usual way" and the way was so widespread and usual that nobody bothered to specifically document it!
@@scottfw7169 Yes - reminds me of Samuel Pepys going off at lunchtime to order his "ordinary".
...we've got a guy that does that with a pencil... Priceless.
Amazing detective work. So many nuances. I really liked how they tried to tie the boat to commerce between the Rhine and England. And that it used a Mediterranean construction technique. Since the later boat was built differently, smaller without tennons, I wonder if the Romans decided the bigger design did not fit with Rhine commerce. Or maybe at this time the upper Rhine was not as firmly under Roman control as the lower Rhine so the boats did not travel so far upstream. Also, how were they towed - by cattle along the adjacent Roman road? It seems towing would limit the boats to the lower Rhine for delivering goods upstream. Maybe they used smaller simply made boats or rafts to bring goods from farther upstream.
I thought about being an archeologist but studied engineering instead. All that digging in mud and dirt would have been trying.
But how special to be involved in discovering the forgotten past.
As far as the video, interesting to hear the Dutch with English at least as good as the English.
Rivers have shifted constantly over time. I was recently watching videos about the river boat Sultana tragedy north of Memphis, the ruins of which are no longer in the river, but under the soil of some Arkansas farmers field.
Absolutely fascinating! A very big Thank You to all involved!
I'm guessing the metal spear head belonged to the "retired soldier" who became a shipper and took it with him as a memento from his soldering days. Imagine if it was from the actual spear he used in battles! To him, it would be a sacred souvinir; a tangible piece of his legacy; an object for his children and aquaintances to touch and marvel at as he tells war stories about how he used it in battles.
Thats actually a pretty good guess. Humans are very much the same nowadays and its very common for people to keep mememtos from their service.
The computer model of the boat at the end showed what I suspected they would do, which is to show perfectly straight, smooth, regularly spaced bottom frames, for example. BUT! The original boat showed very irregular sizes, spacing, and smoothness to the frames. In fact, most were very irregularly sawn out and the whole was quite rustic. The planks were probably less so but still not at all like the computer model of the boat suggests. The differences add up to night versus day.
It's is amazing how different people with different backgrounds come together to make a discovery that shows the human beings of long ago. I wish I could of had this when I was young.
This program was filmed in 2004 eighteen years ago a quality program before dumbing down began
I groaned every time the chainsaw started .
To put so much time and effort into this project, only to eventually cover it up again, is mind boggling. I just can’t fathom the logic.
Twice, they dug it out and buried it not once, but twice.
It really sucks how archeologists and historians can't take over an entire site for as long as they need with no time limits. There's like liquid gold underneath our feet that will probably never be discovered for the next thousand years or if even it lasts that long..... It just makes me sad.....
Been a while since I’ve watched TimeTeam. Forgot how much I enjoyed them.
Incredible finds but my stomach just turned when I head them say they have cut this amazing part of Roman history in half to store it !! Oh My
Had they not done that it would rot away. This way they are able to preserve half of it as they found it.
Absolutely exciting. Wonderful to be able to date this Barge. 🌻
What an amazing find!
Oh I do hope they dig it up sooner rather than later. Spectacular
It is not true that their is no natural stone in the Netherlands. In the East and South their is, but that is mostly limestone and that is not suited and used for reenforcing riverbanks then and now. You have to import for that purpose heavy hard stone like basalt or granite or as they do now produce it from concrete. Otherwise you can repeat the operation every ten years or so because it is soluble and very soft. Good for building houses and churches but not for building dijkes. (I have to mispell it, because otherwise the text is deleted by You Tube)
Oh gosh! So amazing. I feel as if I worked with them for this victory!
In one of the earliest Time Team episodes they mention that no one has ever found a Roman boat. Since then dozens have been found all over Europe, in varying conditions, although I believe we're still missing some of the bigger ocean going vessels. It's unlikely we'll ever find those. After all the only reason we have Viking ships is because they were buried with their owners, and that was a few hundred years later
Another amazing episode! Always so fascinating to watch :)
For anyone interested or studying this (and forgive me if this is already common knowledge but I just thought I'd throw it in)... there is a very similar (although much smaller) boat like this in a museum in Dover (UK). From memory, I believe the Dover one is attributed to the Stone Age but the construction looks very similar. In this video (around 37:00-38:00) there is discussion of these barges being used to transfer cargo to sea-going boats, then up the Thames estuary. Is it possible that the Dover boat is actually Roman? (There is a Roman house in Dover as well) Is it possible that there were smaller versions of this boat is use in the UK to transport cargo offloaded from the sea-going vessels? Just a thought.
The Dover boat dates from the early bronze age and is around 3,500 years old dating from 1575-1520 BC. The late neolithic ended around 1900 BC, the Bronze age started around 1200 BC. note that the beginnings and ends of these eras did not occur everywhere at the same time.
A half size replica of this boat was constructed, initial leakage problems solved and in 2014 successfully sailed from Folkestone to Dover.
I'm not an expert, just googled to find accurate information.
-dave (Undergraduate degree in Anthropology/Archaeology)
You’d think it was carbon dated .
Maybe contaminated test ?
@@seanfaherty Carbon dating of wood can be inaccurate if the wood was saturated with fresh water for any length of time. For wood structures, like these boats, Dendrochronology is fairly accurate in the UK to about 4200 BC.
-dave
This ship should be totally excavated and displayed in a museum for everyone to see
I think they're leaving this on in the ground because there's already some other boats they excavated. It's amazing the kind of stuff they find here. In my town (Nijmegen, also a Roman town and allegedly the oldest still inhabited city) they found a Roman mummy in a sarcophagus. That is in the museum here now, along with a war chariot and a lot of other stuff. Every time there's a dig in certain areas of the city they ALWAYS find stuff.
I live near Exeter (a major Roman site) in South Western England. Parts of the original Roman city walls still exist and the original river bridge was preserved. I’d love to know if any Roman boats were found.
Get that metal detector out and find yourself a gladius.
Great Viewing. Too bad more time is not allowed in some of these wonderful Documentaries. Watch & Enjoy. Thanks.
I would have liked to see the entire boat.
You got to see Tony Robinson. Lol
What I find fascinating about the tools is just how much they look like tools that would have been around in the 1800´s to early 1900´s. I got some sheers and tools that look pretty much exactly the same. My father even has planes that look just like those roman ones.
The shears are identical to what can be bought today. They sheared sheep taking off the wool with a scissor like action. Those wood planes are used by some carpenters. Why I don't know but they work as good as a pot metal plane. Mind you the carpenters had multiple planes.
@@bunzeebear2973 Wooden planes are used because of a few different reasons. Ease of adjustment, while one would think that the mechanism on metal planes is better it is actually more elaborate and can be more finnicy. While learning curve on wooden planes is steeper, once you got it you can set them with a hammer in seconds. Also the way they glide. Metal planes have a higher friction needing more force and at times lubrication, while wood on wood glides much easier. Together with the lightness of wooden planes they also make working for longer times much easier. The feedback you get from working is also supposedly better in wodden planes.
It's amazing what can be found.I really enjoyed it
This video is almost 10 years old. You can now have a look at ‘De Meern 1’ in the Museum Hoge Woerd in Utrecht. In the museum in the archeological theme park Archeon in Alphen aan de Rijn you can see ‘De Zwammerdam 2’.
Methinks it's more like *_SEVENTEEN_*_ YEARS OLD,_ as it was originally shown on BBC in 2006!
One of the very best Time Team episodes, ever!
Thank you for presenting a relatively objective - 'here's what we found' video. Subbed to keep my antique brain thinking and growing!
Never cease to be amazed by finds of time passé hidden history is there it’s just finding it great viewing.
Hadrian's wall was in Northumberland not Scotland...nice one Tony
Love this video! Just the right amount of info and insights without stretching to a mini-drama!
Nice i live in the province of Utrecht. In the city of Amersfoort. Funny to see them somewhere i know.
This is fascinating. We think of ourselves being so advanced and smart. Well. others long before us show that we are standing on their shoulders
Very interesting. Not only the artifacts themselves but the geology of the area.
Absolutely fascinating!
Oak Island would be so jealous with all that wood they found
OUTSTANDING SHOW~!!! THANKS SO MUCH~!
Given that ship builders and woodworkers deliberately avoid using sapwood due to the inherent stability problems with it, finding it would be surprising to find much of it in the boat. So sad just to cover it up again after all that work.
Thanks for posting
At 35.35 Mick dismisses the wood pole as nothing to do with the boat because it is on top of the rocks. However if the pole was stowed at the side of the boat and the boat was on the cant then the rocks could easily have rolled under the pole. In other words, could the pole be part of the vessel and in fact be the derigged cross spar of the top of the square sail
Could the rock be ballast?
@@jamesnewbold2134 no need for ballast in a river boat.
ballast only makes sense if you put it into the lowest part of a v-shaped boat, this boat is flat.
then the ballast is used to counter the forces of the wind that tilt the boat sideways when the wind does not come from straight behind.
this boat is only able to sail when the wind does come from straight behind.
However:
if the rock was brought there from somewhere upriver it would have been brought there by boat...
IF it was cargo the pole that was on top of it could have been part of the boat.
WHAT an episode. Wow. Fantastic.
It is amazing how much actual work YOU don't SEE. A little bit of hand shovel work, wooden spatula work, drinking beer work. The housing complex could build around the dig site making it the last area to build on. Meaning they have time to dig it up...if they really wanted it. More people with more spatulas and plastic snow shovels. I don't know, maybe get lucky and find a slave still tethered to an oar? You do it while the sun shines, for a rainy day is just miserable. They dug out the inside. To dig out the outside of the boat(free it from the mud/clay takes much more work to remove much more material.)
The story of Caligula is myth deviced by his enemies in the Senate after his death and damnatio memoriae and made a monster of him . They have done the same with other emperors like Tiberius, Domitianus and Commodus etc., after mostly murdering them, who mostly were fyscaly prudent and wouldn't let them profit corruptly. It is likely that the soldiers just refused to embark , because Roman soldiers were unbelievable supersticious and afraid for the ocean. Of course a General with authority, like Vespasianus a view years later would have succeeded to convince them to go, but in that stage of his carreer he wasn't yet able to do it.
Caligula and his sister likely they imprisoned them house arrest style alone together as young teens who did not know if today we die or not for years. The huge ships build in a lake for a very expensive show found. The rest we don't know. Caligula not in power long enough to build the favor of the common man like Nero who slandered by the upper classes had two different movements after his death named for him a sign of strong support from the people.
AS ALWAYS,,,,,, BEAUTIFUL VIDEO WITH A BEAUTIFUL STORY
Not excavating and properly conserving this artifact is a crime against humanity.
I was there with my colleagues from the Geological Survey of the Netherlands. I was keen to collect molluscs for an environmental reconstruction of the deposits. Unfortunately no molluscs were present.
@36:16 - I say this wider longer barge got stuck in a tight bend. It could have gotten high-centered on a sand or silt bar, so they just used it in a utilitarian way. Just like the far too huge cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal.
This was great
Thank you
When they found out the tree ring date
I was laughing with them
Baldric !, that's good enough for me to subscribe, I've just watched The Dig, so this should be interesting.
Great episode! ❤
Excellent narration.
Cool i’m living in Utrecht :)
Getting my Time Team Fix today! :)
Great Content as Usual.
Those wooden shoes though! LOL
They ought to bring back Time Team
I’m sorry but I still can’t agree with taking a chain saw to that beautifully preserved piece of history and a huge section at that, I’m very familiar with dendrology in the dating of early historic homes and
Never is more than a few bored samples or-cores needed from 6 to 12 inches in depth. But honestly
I’m no Roman archeologist to be truthful.
Absolutely xlnt!
Seriously, you have so many people standing around, you could get alot more done if everybody would work!
If I had 3 days I would have a bigger crew to get the whole thing.
one of the best episodes!
I have a question concerning the whole "3" day issue. When a discovery of this importance is found, dig the whole thing out, If doing that takes "3" weeks, then so be it. ... [We can only dig two trenches] .. Again, if you need to, after discovering anything, and then to presurve the history of what it is you found, takes 3 weeks, then that is how long you stay.
In this case it was perfict they did not have enough time to get the boat out period just enough to verify it's status before construction occured. The site marked for a future dig assuming someone comes up with the funds and way to preserve it better than just leaving it in the ground.
Think of Time Team as a site finder with most serious work done later assuming they find something worth doing.
@@RedRocket4000 Meanwhile the government spends countless millions on pointless wars that could easily fund it's excavation and preservation.
time team was a TV sponsored mega test pit and emergency rescue resource , anything left in the ground can be dug better next year,next decade next century this is why the site mangers only allows limited dig area on a site and some times limited trench numbers.
there is now a drive to have a you tube supported version.
@@RedRocket4000 Given that the only thing that would have been delayed by fully excavating this ship was a proposed bike path, there's no reason why it couldn't have been done.
@@nobodyspecial4702 the problem is not the digging, it´s the storage. If you haven´t the perfect storage facilities, money for preservation or both, it´s better to let it in the ground for future generations who - hopefully - will have the necessary funding. Plus, science is evolving, maybe future scientifical methods would be better for research, storage, etc. Till then, the ground will preserve it better, like it did the last 2000 years.
I don't know why they call it a "barge" a barge is generally not self powered, it's a floating dock that gets pulled/push around. This was a sail boat.
I would like to see the look on your face if that bloody boat had made in Japan stamped on cheers mate from Australia.
Awesome!
Vraiment une belle émission sur la navigation et l'Histoire Européenne.
just love the proof of history
EXCELLENT JOB WELL DONE 👏 ✔️ 👍
Define ‘perfectly preserved’! Oh, is it just like the perfect Mary Rose?
My grandfather, a lifelong expert in woodworking, wood species, and their growth (though not a scientist) was always skeptical of "dendro dating" (dendrochronology) for the primary reason that trees do not uniformly experience weather or seasons between other trees.
The basic premise of the scientific process is measuring the tree rings which grow thicker in wetter seasons, thinner in drier seasons, and can show other events like fire. The idea being if you can align the fluctuations of tree rings with other dated tree samples you can estimate when it lived and died (provided you have a full set of rings).
The issue my grandfather had with this process is you can have a single grove of trees where some trees produce entirely different rings throughout their life because of minor differences in landscape. The trees on top of a hill might get far more wind and far less water. The trees in a gulch might have more water and less wind, but also less sunlight.
The variations in a single grove can be great, so it becomes an absurdity to think you can match the partial ring sample from a boat beam to an incredibly incomplete database of rings patterns when you can't even say what country that tree was cut down.
Simply put, it's a science with no reasonable frame of reference. It's almost like randomly picking 10 gene markers and then declaring whether or not it's first cousins with a different random 10 gene markers from another sample. You haven't nearly the data to even begin making that determination.
Luckily weather has always changed and therefore major things like a volcanic eruption show up on trees in a large area, and these major events are the biggest contributor to finding the same timeframe, the specifics will always be different for any tree, agreed.
so: c. 85 CE would put it in the reign of Domitian: possibly sunk in Trajan's time.
Really cool, except I wish there was a way to get it out intact instead of burying it again with a bike path over it 😟
There are other boats on display. The most important thing about this 1 is the knowledge that was gained by ascertaining its size, construction, method of loss and accurate dating. The boat has been completely preserved by being buried in the waterlogged soil for 2 millennia - best to leave it there until better technological or archaeological considerations (or climate changes) decide otherwise.
@@theoztreecrasher2647 But there's also a possibility that the location of the boat could be forgotten or lost again to history if it's left buried. But practically speaking, it all comes down to money, it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if not, millions to preserve and display it.
@@supertouring1 There is, of course, the possibility that the recorded and published GPS co-ordinates might disappear from University Libraries and the disseminated servers of the World Wide Web (especially if things continue to deteriorate in Eastern Europe and the Far East.) However, if the unthinkable happens and much of humanity is obliterated with most of its accrued knowledge, it is still probably best to have this left underground for study when the next iteration of human civilization claws its way up out of the radioactive slime. No? 🤔😁
Technology and technique has come so far since then. Imagine building something of that scale and having to use 40,000 massive nails. That would literally weigh several thousand kilograms in just nails..like 4-8000kgs. Imagine the order - "building a boat, need 35-40,000 hand made nails"..
The thing is, Roman civilisation was pretty "industrialised" for its time. Not like us, but they had standarts and streamlined processes. A kind of proto mass production. A very good example are the mountains of broken amphores we find that were basically single use items. A nail in roman times was very likely much more affordable than later in the medieval times.
You would need to write it using roman numerals.. 40,000 is XL with an overline (opposite of underline)
Does anyone else always keep their eye out for Victor in the background of shots for his little cameos?
Outstanding !!
This gave me goosebumps!! 🤭🥰
I love history 😃
24:43 Wait...they've got a key that was reworked into a chisel, indicating these people made tools out of any metal they could lay their hands on. But using a spear point as a tool is somehow a ridiculous idea, even though I can see it was struck on the back without even holding it in my hands!! 🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂
If the contents of my shed were on that boat, there would be an axe head without a handle, that's been used to split logs as a wedge, a pickaxe without a handle too. Just saying sometimes we keep stuff with the intention of fixing, or because they're handy in other ways. That spear like you say, was very likely the same, kept with the intention of fixing, or being used in other ways.
Wait, they dated it to the time of Caligula partially because of the coins they found? What if the soldiers just had coins from a few years back with them? When I was in the army I had coins with Washington on them.
There's a lot of statistics and methodology behind it. In short: coins with the current emperor were most likely to be carried, because coins were minted as propaganda for the reigning monarch. Statistically, the most up to date coins were carried by the military (especially as they were freshly supplied from the mints for their salary). If a significant portion of coins are from Caligula and none are later, there's a more than fair chance that that is the rough date of the site.
@Merovech correct, but where were the coins being minted? Did the soldiers use their coins right away or is it possible they are older and they were held by the soldiers until they would get them stamped if they had the old emporers coins on them? This seems like it'd be a remote base. Seems like if this is what it is based off of it is shaky at best.
They dated it according to the AGE OF THE WOOD(chainsaw cut) So, they know when the tree existed. Then using MATH they could figure out which ruler was ruling at that time.
I think the copper hemisphere is from an old float valve. Looks like one I have.
Great video. It is ashamed that they just covered it back up.
Mortice and tennon? That's a pegged joint and probably tapered to drawer the planks together.
Great content
The Dutch are digging this and the Brits are trying to take credit for it.
They always do!
TT only go were invited so I expect you will find the dutch guys needed cash to continue their dig so you can thank the British for paying for it's discovery.
Seems to me that they were invited by the Dutch because the Dutch ran out of money.